


The Invisible Threat

by TheVenerableCharlotte



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 17:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9832517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVenerableCharlotte/pseuds/TheVenerableCharlotte
Summary: Natasha receives some difficult news, and for the first time in her life, she doesn't know how to handle it.Even Earth's Mightiest Heroes aren't safe from what they can't see.





	

Goddamn it, even after everything she’d been through, she thought she was tougher than this. 

Even now, within walking distance of a phone or the door leading out of her apartment into the outside world where people filled the streets with their mindless chatter, she had never felt so helpless; frozen to the spot with a dull loneliness the likes of which she hadn’t felt in a long time. A lifetime ago.

It wasn’t as if some unknown force had trapped her in the bathroom, the cold blast of the shower irrevocably chaining her down through magic or matter manipulation so she would feel the full force of what a person’s mind could do when left all alone. God knows she wouldn’t put it past the universe after some of the stuff she had been through. She might have even preferred that to be the case; at least then she could think for a minute that it wasn’t her fault, that her mind hadn’t already begun to lead her astray as she knew it inevitably would. 

No, the only thing keeping her there now as the unending cascade of water drenched her hair, her clothes, her shoes…was the mind-numbing apathy that for some reason made her sick to her stomach even more than this chain that shackled her. And of course, once this conclusion has been reached, the question remained: how much longer would she be here? 

She would have chuckled if her body had willed it. Instead she remained deathly still in her prison as her mind battled it out whether she should drown herself in her own pity. 

Her eyes continued to glaze over as she soundlessly struggled, pushing past the shrill emptiness in her head for a semblance of focus. She wasn’t usually articulate before her imprisonment unless she needed to be. Back when she was who she used to be, she had no doubt that every other sentence in her head would be dripping with sarcasm and laced with more than a few profanities. Now? She couldn’t even summon that if she tried. 

Even in the worst of situations, the greatest heroes in the world had continuously stood up against the evils that plague the world; for better or for worse they had proven themselves to be the toughest of the tough, the shining example of humanity. Of course, one was imbued with godly power, so who knows how he would react in this situation.

Probably better than her. 

That didn’t sound too hard. 

Didn’t sound too hard for any of the others either, she wondered, her mind wandering to how Steve would tell everybody they needed to focus on whatever task was currently at hand, or how Thor would laugh the entire thing off and spout some Asgardian rhetoric about how all warriors must eventually leave the battlefield. 

And she would make a sarcastic remark. 

And everybody would laugh. 

And everybody would go off and do whatever it was they were doing before and ignore the fact that everybody knew full well that nobody was focusing on what they were doing before anymore. 

That was the protocol, and she didn’t have a doubt that if it had happened to anybody else they would have accepted it with their head held high, maybe pulling some of their ‘smile for the camera’ tricks that they had perfected over the years and assuring everybody that they would get through this. 

She tried not to think of how she had walked back to her living quarters in the Tower without a word before making a beeline for the bathroom and leaning over the toilet while she threw up for what could have been hours. 

She hadn’t even locked the door behind her.

Her memory was still fuzzy, still blocked out by her own mind, not even sure if she had the energy to hate the predicament she was in anymore. She remembered waking up to a star-fished body next to her; mouth open with drool pooling around her mouth as always, totally unapologetic and so…her.

Cursing in frustration as her waffle lay face-down the floor, taunting her with its inedibility...

Sparring with Steve as her body moves as if on autopilot, blocking and dodging hits, returning her own with a deadly focus...

Sitting in Helen’s quaint lab as her words echoed off the walls, not really reaching her ears, not really noticing her face as her lips moved, her speech so muffled she could barely make it out.

“...Should’ve noticed it bef...”

“...Eleven months...”

That’s when everything starts coming into focus. That’s when everything becomes familiar, when that feeling started taking over her body and shackling her, reducing her to the apathetic shadow sitting in her shower. 

She vaguely remembers the aftermath, only vaguely. Things changed immediately after that, there was no denying that fact. She no longer walked, she glided. Her memories were sparse; she faintly remembers gliding out of Helen’s office without a word, her reassuring platitudes and heartbroken eyes sliding off her like rain from a rooftop. She dimly remembers silently standing as the elevator travelled down to her floor, her eyes staring ahead as if she didn’t really see what was in front of her as she stepped out of the doors and headed towards her own door. 

And now she was here, feeling the stream from the shower drench her entire body in cold water, clothes and all. In a faint moment of clarity, she could feel the water that soaked her hair and seeped down her body and over her clothes, damaging them possibly irreversibly. 

But once more, apathy reared its ugly head as it did even in the most trivial of circumstances. Then again, impending mortality will do that to a person.

More than once, her mind wandered to how she would tell everybody. At the current moment, she was indifferent; whether it would be best if she told everybody one by one in an intimate setting or it was for some reason broadcast on every television channel for the world to see was strangely lost on her. She tried to think on exactly how everybody would respond to the blow she had recently been dealt. 

Steve would probably lock himself into ‘Captain Mode’; swearing to be there for her, no matter what happened. 

Tony would probably be struck silent, every witty remark dying in his mouth before he could say it. 

She could probably count on Clint to come up with at least eight different variations of ‘well, that sucks’. What he actually wanted to say would probably come later. It always did. 

Moving her body for the first time in what could have been hours or maybe even days she shook her head almost imperceptibly, silently shaking off the thoughts of how this someone would react. 

She couldn’t think about how she might hear screams.

Or cries. 

Or nothing at all; she couldn’t think about that; contingency plans be damned. Trapped in her own goddamn head with the knowledge that all the walls that she had meticulously broken down through sheer, dogged persistence alone over the course of their love would be erected once more in the blink of an eye, ten times taller and stronger than before. The ever-present futility of the entire exercise was torture enough.

She still felt like the entire thing had to be a practical joke; that everybody would burst into the bathroom laughing and smiling and telling her that everything was all going to be okay. 

Everybody got headaches. 

Everybody forgot things from time to time. 

And she knew Helen was lying when she said Fury had ordered tests for all of them for “maximum medical coverage and efficiency in the field”. 

That sentence alone didn’t make any sense. 

But she went in anyway, did Helen’s stupid tests anyway, believed her when she looked her in the eye and told her everything was fine. She’d grown to trust Helen too much over the course of their friendship. That’s what she got, it seemed.

Or maybe Helen had just gotten better at lying over the course of being at Stark Tower. 

Or maybe she had just gotten too confident in herself. Perhaps if she had been sick more times she would have paid more attention to ways of death outside of weapons and found out a way to prevent this quandary, quieting the soft voice in her head that reminded her of the impossibility of this with almost expert ease. She couldn’t let the reassuring voices in her head get to her, pointedly ignoring the soothing consolations and reminders that she wasn’t in fact alone. 

She might just break if she let them in.

But of course, that had led her here. 

Sitting in the floor of the shower with her back pressed up against the wall, feeling the cascade of water envelop her almost completely, her wet hair sticking to the sides of her face that had started to shiver only a few moments previously from the temperature of the water. The clothes she was wearing were ruined beyond repair, water seeping into everything, making everything infinitely heavier.; the miracle that she could breathe through the relentless stream of water was marred by the apathy that she had felt sitting on her shoulder since before she had left Helen’s office. 

She wanted it to be washed down the drain forever, along with the water. But she knew that once it had gone, she would do anything to have that numbness back, that ability to feel nothing leaving a hollow emptiness right where it hurt most. 

So she left it there. 

She thought about how there had been no tears shed, that she had arrived at the quite logical conclusion that maybe a shower would wash away the intense, burning nothingness she felt, the same nothingness that had caused her to do away with the dispensing of clothes, a facet somewhat traditional when having a shower. 

The same nothingness that rendered her almost incapable of standing, instead assisting her in sliding her back down the wall until she ended up in a sitting position, one leg splayed out and the other close to her body, her knee high up for her chin to rest on if she so desired. 

This is how she had been for what felt like her entire life, or at least what she remembered. She wondered if this is how she would feel for her entire life, or at least what remained. 

Her entire life, she’d been prepared for death. From the Red Room, to becoming the world’s foremost assassin, to becoming a part of S.H.I.E.L.D.; all of it had the same tagline of death before you get old enough to think about retiring. Her life had left no room for a late death.

Despite everything that had happened, preparing for death that she could beat if she fought hard enough was the only thing that she had been focusing on. A death that she couldn’t avoid no matter what she did felt strangely…refreshing. Even if the outcome was anything but.

She almost didn’t want to entertain her mind into thinking that she wouldn’t feel this numbness when it got worse. After all, she wasn’t doing a particularly good job so far. But on some level, she almost admired herself for at least trying to think so; she felt she wouldn’t be remiss in thinking that the old her would have found meaning in everything that had happened so far. 

But that was what she would have done before everything that she cared about was ripped away from her before she even knew what had happened. The old her would have found meaning in the dilemma that she was in. The old her would have found meaning in the faint noise of the door opening and slamming shut, in hearing her name being worriedly called out in a muffled voice repeatedly, in hearing slow, hesitant steps towards her current location before hearing the door gradually open with a creak.

Even in this, the darkest of situations, she heard a faint voice in her head congratulate her for hearing these things, for shifting her eyes up steadily and locking her blank stare with the horror-struck eyes of her special someone standing frozen in the doorway, faintly noticing her love’s struggle for composure. 

Of course she did. 

Of course she told Darcy. 

‘But then again, why would you care?’, the little demon on her shoulder cruelly whispered into her ear. ‘At least this way, it saves you the trouble’. 

She had too much red in her ledger to ever truly believe that she would have a happy ending. 

But for the first time since this cloud took over her mind, she didn’t want to be saved the trouble. Despite all of the warning sounds going off in her mind, she didn’t want to be trapped with this demon on her shoulder. She didn’t want to be alone as this demon corrupted her mind and clouded her thoughts beyond reprieve. 

It was strange, she thought, what your mind could do when left on its own. Maybe this was a variation on how Bruce felt when the Other Guy came out to play, leaving Dr. Banner left to the side, the most important part of who he was discarded like a broken toy. At least she had a name for herself now.

The broken toy.

Even now the demon struggled for dominance over her mind. She wasn’t a fool, this is how the battle would go forever. Her apathy vs. her spirit. For now, she wasn’t sure who would win; she couldn’t even begin to know. 

But in this moment, as she locked gazes with her love, she felt the demon on her shoulder slowly but steadily start to lose its grip. She struggled to notice it for the longest time, too tired to capitalise on her freedom. 

But gradually, as she saw her love begin to walk forward without a word, careful like she had just stepped into a minefield rather than her own bathroom, her focus progressively started to shift. 

The dull grey of her hair becoming a beautiful brown as she continued to close the gap. 

The pitter-patter of the rain hitting her outfit slowly becoming louder as she gingerly stepped into the shower with her. 

And suddenly she was just...there. Her love sat beside her as they both proceeded to be wordlessly soaked by the downpour of the shower, no words needing to be said in that moment or any moment.

In that moment, she delicately felt the arm of her love snake over her shoulder to the side of her head. 

She heard the silent cheers of her mind as she ignored the protesting screams of the demon, slowly sliding her head along the marble tile and feeling her head come to rest on the shoulder of her love, feeling the top of her head rest against her cheek as her love softly and repeatedly ran her thumb along her cheek. 

Looking back on this moment, she would herald this moment as the moment that the demon finally lost its grip, falling from her shoulder and disappearing down the drain.

But of course, she would also remember hoping beyond hope that this was the end of the demon on her shoulder. 

That she had fought and battled and came out victorious on the other side. 

Looking back, she would remember that she had forgotten the true struggle that was to come. 

All the heartbreak and intense feelings and thoughts of suicide; they came afterwards. No matter how hard she tried to suppress them.

She had won the battle, but she was foolish to think she could have won the war. 

And looking back on that one moment, she knew that it had already begun; she was simply pushing those thoughts to the back of her mind, as she had been doing the second she received the news. 

But time would pass. 

And she would remember that moment. But she wouldn’t remember that moment as the moment she banished the demon from her mind. 

She wouldn’t remember it as the time her love had held her close and refused to leave even after god knows how long of silence.

Instead she would remember the fact that in that moment, as the water enveloped them both, Darcy would never know that that was the first moment that Natasha allowed herself to weep.


End file.
